A Little Piece of Class

Presqu'île means peninsula, "almost an island." For my money (not that of a rich man), Cap-Ferrat, a green presqu'île jutting out beyond the little port of St-Jean on the Mediterranean, is close to being a vacationer's Shangri-la. These days, the insomniac clubbers, the insensitive rich, and unenlightened foreigners seeking to buy into the legend of the French Riviera miss the road down to St-Jean Harbor (too narrow for a tour bus) and drive on without noticing the cape beyond—a thin two-mile finger of gated villas with vast grounds, thick vegetation, a few quiet little public beaches, and some hotels of character.

Twenty years and more had passed since I was on Cap-Ferrat, and upon my return, almost nothing—except for the people—had changed. Saul Steinberg, that Wall Street titan of his era, later financially troubled, had long since given up his brief ownership of the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, never to return. More recent owners, Lebanese jewelers, had endowed the lobby with a bright and endearingly dubious look that might be called Beirut Traditional. Then Len Blavatnik, a Russian billionaire with American citizenship living in London, bought the hotel, along with Paris's Hôtel Vendôme, for a reported $318 million, in the name of his U.S. company S.T.T. Properties. It was recently shuttered for yet another face-lift. Alberto Pinto, a decorator dear to the rich, devoted himself to gussying up the best suite in the house. Whatever "relooking," as the French say, was in store, this hotel was bound to prevail as an evocative Riviera landmark. It rises within its lush fourteen-acre compound at the very point of Cap-Ferrat like a great white paradigm of La Belle Epoque—all flowers, palm trees, and umbrella pines above a bright sea.

People of many kinds come and go, and Cap-Ferrat digests their passage. Steinberg sold when, it is said, he was shocked to learn that in order to build an extension to the hotel he would need to give the right gift. René Vestri, Cap-Ferrat's affable mayor, dismissed that charge when I saw him. He pointed out that it is illegal to build almost anything new on the cape.

The Belle Epoque-, Art Deco-, and Renaissance-inspired villas, where kings Léopold II of Belgium and Umberto of Italy—along with lords, ladies, and the likes of Burton and Taylor, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Sean Connery, Charlie Chaplin, and so on—once spent long seasons, are now mostly inhabited by a new wave of residents: Russians, Lebanese, and Italians of obscure power and wealth. Today's celebrities are "zappers," Mayor Vestri said. One day they're in Africa, another they're in Croatia. They're seen on Cap-Ferrat only fleetingly if at all. The newcomers plunk down $25 million for a villa. Cap-Ferrat is now the priciest real estate on the coast.

"If you poke your nose over a fence, you're likely to find a guard's pistol in your nostril," a cape stalwart told me. It was here, in his villa, La Mauresque, that Somerset Maugham made the pronouncement whose aptness has outlived his beautifully crafted novels: "The Riviera is a sunny place for shady people." Whatever the moral hue of some of those people in the hushed villas may be, it won't have an immediate bearing on your stay. The cape is a particularly safe place—safer than, say, Nice, where road signs advised me to keep my car doors locked and where the mayor told hoteliers to warn guests not to be in the Old Town after one o'clock in the morning. Maybe the petty criminals of the coast have also heard about the pistols over the fence.

Since Léopold bought a huge part of the shoreline in the 1890s to build a villa and sell off the rest, Cap-Ferrat has known a series of great achievers, each of whom left his stamp on Riviera history. (Léopold had a thing for real estate. The Belgian Congo wasn't Belgium's; it was his personal property.) Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is among today's villa dwellers. His place looms above the port where he moors his ultra-high-tech yacht and where Bill Gates, his fellow co-founder and old friend, sails in to visit in a very modest little boat. Gates was rumored to have been interested in buying the most extraordinary property on the coast, the Villa Léopolda, in nearby Villefranche, which had been the grandest in King Léopold's brace of Riviera residences. Although Gates was said to have made an offer to Lilly Safra, widow of the banker Edmund Safra (victim of a shady murder in Monaco), the villa is still for sale. (For $295 million—anyone interested?)

That last time, long ago, when I was here, Lynn Wyatt, wife of the Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt, was renting Somerset Maugham's former place. This was the tail end of the partying wave at Cap-Ferrat, whose heyday had known Burton, Taylor, Niven, Peck, et al. I had chatted with her then in her lovely ocher villa. This time, she was renting a villa in Villefranche. I had lunch with her son, Steve, a venture capitalist who is of the latest generation of Cap-Ferrat lovers, and some friends. We ate in bathing suits beside the big saltwater pool at the Grand-Hôtel, the far edge of which blends, trompe l'oeil, into a vista of the sea.

Steve had his kids with him. Perched above the pool wearing his big sombrero, Pierre Grüneberg, the swim instructor, was on duty, as he has been for about forty years. Pierre has the enduringly svelte body of someone who has spent his life summering on the cape and wintering on the ski slopes, and has taught more children of the mighty to swim than doubtless any other person on earth.

On the day I arrived, the hotel was inaugurating a little playground in the garden. More than ever, kids are in among the creative and accumulative people who come here. Children fit particularly well into the general atmosphere of the cape, which is not edgily shrill as in St-Tropez nor show-off shrill as in Monte Carlo. Mayor Vestri uses the term bon enfant to describe the mood of his constituency, where the single discotheque—a phenomenon at the hotel Voile d'Or during the Hollywood era—was banned years ago. Bon enfant is hard to translate into English, but it means something like well behaved, friendly—Apollonian, if you will.

My friend Elliott Kastner, a film producer who knew the cape in its Hollywood days, is a devoted client of the Voile d'Or's. "I had been renting the villa at the Hôtel du Cap, in Antibes, for four weeks of the year for twenty-nine years," he told me, "and when I stepped into the Voile d'Or, I knew that I liked it even better." The villa at Antibes's Hôtel du Cap might be called the mother of all luxuries. The Voile d'Or, above the port of St-Jean, is totally different. The owner, Jean Lorenzi, put up the banal building in 1965. But it is nonetheless, with its forty-five rooms, an intimate, un-self-consciously well-furnished place where Lorenzi and his wife and daughter impart a very bon enfant—"just us few lucky ones"—feeling. As in the bar at the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, trophy photos of the famous adorn the walls.

Needless to say, neither hotel is inexpensive, particularly when the dollar is where it is. They will set you back the price of a room in a luxurious hotel in Paris. But, as I suggested earlier, you need not be rich to love Cap-Ferrat—nor do you feel ostracized from the social swim. There is no preening "scene," and R and R is the operative term for bathing, sailing, and reading. As for languages, English is the second one on the cape, where about forty percent of the summer people are American and forty percent are French. The new Chinese, who mill around the Eiffel Tower in droves, have yet to discover Cap-Ferrat, although the cable TV in the Grand has two channels in Russian.

There are six little beaches, four of which are free of charge and have an atmosphere that is also very bon enfant—and nudist-free. The latter factor is important these days on the shores of Europe for people distressed by the seaside fad of letting it all hang out. The French Ministry of Health rates all six cape beaches first quality—no small matter given the dubious waters of the Mediterranean: Nice, for example, has four beaches classified in the second-best category.

The restaurants, whether luxe or not, are no pricier than their equivalents in Paris, and you get the seaside thrown in with a meal. Eating outstanding fish is a chancy thing all along the coast. The cruel reality is that there are few fish left in the Mediterranean, and what you eat will most likely have come down from the Atlantic or been farmed. The Voile d'Or, though, still has a great reputation for bouillabaisse, which is as much a traditional local dish here as it is in Marseille. Yves Maätrehenry owns what is far and away the best of the few inexpensive places to stay on the cape: the Brise Marine, in one of the loveliest locations. It was built in 1878 as a private villa right above a corner of the port. Below the neat rooms, which have the air of a three-star Paris hotel, there is a plain bar for breakfast and a sitting room worthy of a kitsch hotel in Brighton. It's the kind of modest inn that I've seen at other stylish vacation places, where the consciously low-key and savvy share the geography with the rich.

There are other inexpensive hotels where you can profit from the privileged environment of the cape. Iranians have refurbished the Belle Aurore, for instance, but haven't been able to move it from its unhappy location at a crossroads. If you want to hide away in the interior of the cape, you can do so at the Clair Logis, a spartanly furnished former villa with a garden—where Charles de Gaulle spent a moment of what the French call his time in the desert, after he resigned from being president in 1946.

As I talked to Monsieur Maätrehenry at the Brise Marine, Ken Loach, the British film director, came up from the beach carrying a parasol. Monsieur Maîtrehenry told me that Loach has been staying at the Brise Marine for more than forty years. Madame Maîtrehenry, whom her husband of more than four decades calls the soul of the hotel, wasn't around, but I got the feeling, ineffably, that the place indeed has a soul.

Is Cap-Ferrat very French, even for all the generations of foreigners who've declared it theirs? There are still some heirs of the nineteenth-century grande bourgeoisie holding out among the villas that their forefathers built: the Bleriot family, who once manufactured airplanes, and the Marnier-Lapostelles, whose Grand Marnier was a must ingredient for now quaint crêpes suzette (the Marnier-Lapostelles own the villa Les Cèdres, once the property of Léopold II). The cape has always drawn interesting foreigners because it is one of those places where the hands of man and of nature have worked wonderful complicity. Leben wie der Herrgott in Frankreich is what the Germans say to describe the great life: "to live like God himself in France." The Riviera as a whole, meanwhile, has become what Graham Greene, who spent his last years near Nice, once said of Bruges: "a much trafficked jewel." Much trafficked in both senses of the verb. There's indeed another French word, betonné, which means cemented, and it's the term for the overbuilding all along the Côte d'Azur, including the stretch between Nice and the Italian border that is, technically, what we call the Riviera.

It seems to me that Cap-Ferrat has managed to be almost an island protected from all that has befallen the Riviera. The heydays of royalty and robber barons, the communal frolics of celluloid stars, have passed here, as elsewhere. But I think of the clean blue sea; the untouched stretches of umbrella pines, rhododendrons, jasmine, and cactus; the sensuous look that man added to the place with a careful yet indulgent eye for decoration, when less was not more. All this is still barely disturbed by noise—other than the wash of waves and the high-pitched buzz of cicadas—or by fumes that would mar the wild herbal odor on warm air. The glow of what was the bounty of the privileged is still like a vestal flame, and more accessible here than in any place else I know.